Comments

There is SO much wrong with this article (not you, Patrick) that it makes my eyes hurt.

I mean..."When anime conventions started in the U.S. back in the mid-1990s, the main demographic was mostly Asian college-age male students, says 32-year-old otaku expert Lawrence Eng."

What the FUCK, man?! Is that ignorance or just sloppy writing?

I suspect that at Project A-Kon there weren't too many Asian college age students...

If anyone ever doubted that the press has these big books of 'approved style', the pre-formatted concepts ready to be regurgitated REGARDLESS OF ANY OUTSIDE OBJECTIVE TRUTH just needs read this article. It hits all the same points that we saw back in the '90s with the whole 'Violent, porn 'toons from Japan invade!' comment.

Just the same that any overview of comics and movies based on comic books MUST say something like "BIFF! BAM! POW! Comics aren't kid stuff anymore!"

Put the money back in the locker, man. It's just the Mafia trying to jack you up.

"But sexually-suggestive and explicit anime like "Gurren Lagann" and "Legend of the Overfiend," is finding an eager audience of adult Americans who are drawn to the post-modern, almost post-human mash-up of playful, blurry morality found in the genre."

Wait, what the fuck? How are Gurren Lagann and Overfiend even remotely similar?

But Patrick, in the eyes of the writer, there wasn't anything wrong. It fit the template that existed.

It's lazy writing combined with the arrogance of the press, na mean? The simple fact that Overfiend was dragged into the mix (where it hasn't been of any significance for years now, just as nobody really talks about Akira anymore) should be a clue that his major research is what's already been written in the past and accepted as template.

I mean, who are YOU to fact check his writing? He's working with MSNBC, you're just (his secret opinion, you know it's not mine) some jerkwater dude who edits a geek mag (altho OUSA having 60k sales is VERY impressive to me in today's marketplace.)...

And while I try to keep politics to myself because it's so damn fractional nowadays, I just hope that everyone who feels a bit of outrage at the lazy writing and lockstep following of the template will come to understand it's like that for ALL news, ALL of it. So, just, think, y'all.

WAH: I think you did a double take over the adjective agreement in that sentence. He's saying Gurren-Lagann is sexually suggestive and Overfiend is sexually explicit. Which happens to be true on both counts.

But yeah, it's very clear that this article was written with its conclusion in mind, and tailored the quotes from Lawrence, Patrick, etc to suit that conclusion. Thanks a bunch, "liberal media"!

Honestly, I had to think for for a second as to why Gurren Lagann was suggestive. I'd like to think that I'm no totally oblivious to the implications of what anime presents. If that's the case, it's telling that anime has normalized the notion suggestive representations of women to the point where it took conscious thought to recall the fact that a woman is walking around in a bikini for the entire show.

To all the zealots coming from the Mania.com message boards: My final quote about the kid in the bookstore was taken out of context was not referring to the consumption of explicit sexual material. See also: the rest of the article, which I'm not exactly pleased with either. Seriously.

The selective quoting of the editor makes you come off like a creepy, crouched-over critter in the corner who has been given a chance to defend these sexed-up pre-teen looking figures and the otaku who drool over them, to an American audience who will simply not think any more about the topic other than 'dude, get a REAL girlfriend' combined with a staunch, unjustified predatory viewpoint.

"Click for related content: Science proves that bikinis turn men into boobs"

CUTTING EDGE SEXOLOGY COMMENTARY.

I'm personally kind of bothered by this conception that large masses of anime fans (of any nation) don't have a clue of the difference between fantasy and reality. Some, even many, do, and I'm not going to deny that, and you get it regardless if anime is involved or not. But not teeming masses of horribly messed-up people.

I may be MOE FAN SUPER-EXTRAORDINAIRE (whatever that implies to you), but I most certainly don't think that anime characters are a replacement for real, personal relationships with real people, male or female. I'm not devoid of my own share of social problems (is ANYONE, really? Seriously), but an inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not is not one of them.

And I, too, was terribly confused by the random misquotes, especially as I remember seeing the final quote in its original context, which had nothing to do with sex whatsoever.

I believe that Gilles is referring to the March/April 1993 issue of Wired that ran an article entitled "The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds (Otaku to You)." You can read this article in its entirety online at this link:

In the event anyone still cares about this MSNBC story by the time this weekend ends, the next episode of the Anime World Order podcast will have Patrick on for the news segment to talk about what this article got wrong AND what this article got right.

“Among Japanese fans — the guys — it is a badge of honor to say, ‘We do not need real women; [these] figures are better, they do not talk back’” said Macias. “Americans are not there yet, but at the rate things are going, we are going to be seeing that.”

@Patrick Maschis: having not read any of your work before, I was genuinely taken in for a minute with that article before realising that anything you'd said must have been taken way out of context since the rest of the article in question was so unfairly biased. I can see why you're so pissed off at being misquoted like that, seriously. Damn.

This is an original figure created by Gentaro Araki (a regular at Wonderfest and other figure events) for the book Pure Doll Guide 001, published by Graphic-sha in 2005. But yeah, I reckon you're onto something.

I'm pretty sure the Internet stopped caring about this article 24 hours ago, but in case you're interested, the AWO has conducted an interview with Messr. Patrick Macias regarding this article, how his quotes were taken out of context, and even what the article managed to get right. Listen to the fun at the following link: